The egalitarian aspirations of radicals in the era of the French Revolution have long attracted historians. Mark Philp has been one of the most creative and incisive, and in Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London 1789 –1815 he builds substantially on his earlier work. Most obviously, this new volume rests on the pioneering digital edition of William Godwin's diary (http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk). It also further develops Philp's influential approach to the 1790s as less a debate between loyalist and radical ideologies and more “a polarising process . . . in the course of which the agendas of the reform and loyalist movements were forged” (Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution [2014], 74–75).

One of Philp's major contributions in Radical Conduct is to further develop that contested, conditional, and fragmented picture of radicalism in the 1790s. He does so by examining middling reform circles in London (principally Godwin's wide network, but taking in other subjects as well) and focusing on a novel set of interlinked concerns. These range well beyond the traditional focus on political contests with emerging loyalist positions, though these loom large throughout as part of the context that conditioned radical conduct. Instead, Philp tackles the ways radicals conceptualized and took part in politics and political discussion; the tensions between radical ideals of sociability, friendship, and acquaintance and the practical operation of their circles, particularly with regard to gender; and the costs of radicals’ principled suspicion of entertainment and spectacle.

In the first chapter Philp develops a powerful thesis about changing conceptions of politics. There is a pleasing irony in taking the 1790s—a decade in which textbooks tell the student that politics was everything and everything was political—to make the case for a much more careful understanding of what contemporaries did and did not regard as “politics.” Philp proceeds with some linguistic analysis from digitized newspaper collections and a good deal of careful argument to establish a fundamental distinction for contemporaries: “between speculation about politics and the public activity of politics, with the former being conceived of as a largely private activity pursued by men in their private capacity that reflected on politics but was not in itself a form of political action and that was a matter for deliberation and reflection between friends and acquaintance” (46). It was the activities of government and loyalists—persistently representing private speculation as both political and public—that proved decisive in generating new conceptions of popular politics. In this as elsewhere, loyalism created the very forces it sought to tame. It is a provocative thesis and is likely to be an influential one. It is followed by a chapter exploring the parameters of the “face-to-face world linked by candour, conversation, and deliberation” (88) that Godwin and his ilk sought to enact. Philp argues for the surprising resilience of this political world, which fragmented only in the late 1790s rather than as a direct casualty of government repression and loyalist challenge in the first half of the decade.

While the first two chapters offer a challenge to our overall understanding and chronology of popular politics, the five that follow provide a challenge to notions of the openness and inclusiveness of metropolitan radical circles in the 1790s. There is much here that would (or certainly should) interest historians of other “networks” in the careful examination and reconstruction of the depth and quality—as well as the quantity—of connections between individuals and groups. In Philp's challenge to the notion of a single and relatively open public sphere, Burke's “little platoons” win out. This is nowhere more obvious than in the gendered nature of the radical circles under examination. Chapter 4, for example, explores the evidence for “iterated interaction” (126) around a well-known group of women writers—Mary Robinson, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Alderson, and Eliza Fenwick. The results reveal the near total absence of a group dynamic, still less a collective identity. Customs and conventions of female behavior retained their power in these most enlightened of circles to keep these middle-class women isolated. Godwin's own complex and fascinating relationships with women form the spine of the subsequent chapters, which demonstrate that—even when there was a will to transcend or remake gender relations—these goals fell victim to the power of existing conventions and by deeply embedded concerns about female reputation and conduct.

Philp provides a final irony in the closing chapter by focusing on the radicals’ commitment to a generalized suspicion of entertainment and performance as forces beyond their immediate control and so as a possible contaminant of the rational deliberative discourse they prized. As developing—and to Philp “hegemonic” (225)—loyalism demonstrated, music, dance, and song proved to be exceptionally powerful means of knitting people's daily lives with the political and military conflicts of the French Wars. In rejecting these immersive activities, radicals cut themselves off from a rich resource, thus increasing their isolation and fragmentation.

There is an almost tragic refrain running throughout this rewarding book. Radicals inspired to make the world anew had their aspirations to embody this new world in their own behavior thwarted by the deeply entrenched customs and behaviors of the world from which they sprang, by insurgent loyalism and government intervention, and by the tensions within their own ideas. Philp's overall achievement is a rich, nuanced, and often poignant picture of how metropolitan radicalism was practiced in the age of revolutions.